Sunday Mornings with Mulder and Scully – Monday

Ever feel powerless when you are having a bad day? Like nothing you do makes it any better? Like all this was destined to happen regardless of whether it makes any sense? That you’re stuck in an endless loop of same shit, different day? Ever experience deja vu?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you probably know exactly how Mulder and Scully feel in the season six episode Monday during which they experience the same day repeatedly and though they try to change what happens, they both keep ending up dead. It isn’t their day that is repeating, though. They are unaware that they are being forced to relive a bank robbery gone wrong. The only person who knows that this day is repeating is Pam (Carrie Hamilton), the girlfriend of the bank robber.

Carrie Hamilton puts in such a believable performance as Pam that you both empathize with her essentially living in a sort of purgatory and think she is completely sane. She tries various ways of stopping the tragedy that unfolds when her boyfriend sets off a bomb when his bank robbery goes wrong including trying to change her boyfriend’s mind and trying to convince both Mulder and Scully of her plight. The makeup used for her character, with eyeliner intentionally smudged around her eyes, made her look exhausted. Haunted in a way. I always wonder at the beginning of this episode how many times she really went through this same day only to end up starting it over. Through her dialogue, she mentions over fifty times, but I think it was probably more.

Scully is stuck in a meeting with Skinner as they wait for Mulder to arrive. During a break she calls him and he is headed to the bank after having a horrendous morning. He woke up late because his waterbed, the very bed that Morris Fletcher had purchased earlier in the season during the episode Dreamland, had sprung a leak and shorted out his alarm clock. An angry call from his downstairs neighbor about the water leaking into his apartment and having to clean up the mess left by Fletcher’s waterbed has Mulder in an icky mood. Can’t really blame him there.

Scully’s arc in this episode mimics her arc across the entire series in that her experiences allow her to embrace ideas and events that are not totally based in scientific fact. Mulder is the person who helps her see the world through different eyes even if she is often reluctant to see things from his viewpoint. It also helps set up season eight when Mulder disappears and Scully becomes the believer trying to convince Agents Doggett and Reyes that these paranormal events to exist.

What is so great about this episode is the way  it was filmed. The repetitive nature of the story meant filming Mulder waking up in that leaky waterbed several times but each one is shot differently and plays out in a slightly different manner. The same goes for the bank robbery scene. Mulder is there and tries to stop the robber and the bomb goes off. Yet, each time it plays out differently especially when Scully eventually tries to intervene. Eventually, Mulder begins to remember Pam and the two of them are able to convince Bernard, the robber boyfriend, to give up on the robbery and walk out with Pam. When Bernard hears the police sirens approaching, he turns his gun on Mulder and fires. Pam jumps in front of the bullet. She says, “This never happened before,” as she dies. Dismayed by what he has done, Bernard peacefully allows the officers to arrest him. When Mulder wakes the following morning, a different morning, he says to Scully that he just had a feeling about Pam.

Was it Pam’s need to just be done with the purgatory she found herself in that caused her to jump in front of Mulder to save him from Bernard’s bullet? Was that just who she was as a human being? I like to believe the latter and that her being stuck in that time loop was brought on by her own guilt of having gotten involved with Bernard and being part of his robbery that kills so many innocent people. Perhaps that guilt was so heavy that she desperately wanted to find a way to change it. Alas, we will never know why she ended up where she did. But it made for one hell of an episode.

Comparisons to the Harold Ramis directed film Groundhog Day were made when the episode aired. Some called it a rip off. Derivative. Unoriginal. However, the episode was actually inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone during which a death row inmate is put to death and wakes up after in the courtroom where he was convicted to relive the entire thing over again. This makes more sense given that if it weren’t for shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Twin Peaks that featured unbelievable stories and turned viewers into believers, The X-Files might not have been greenlit by Fox. I find the story that this episode tells is an original one in the context of the series with elements borrowed from other projects. Derivative? Maybe. A standout episode in this season and the series as a whole? Absolutely.

Until next week, the truth is out there.